The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics

567 Pages·1991·2.6 MB·English

by  Christopher Lasch

OTHER BOOKS BY CHRISTOPHER LASCH
The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (1962)
The New Radicalism in America (1965)
The Agony of the American Left (1969)
The World of Nations (1973)
Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977)
The Culture of Narcissism (1979)
The Minimal Self (1984)
Image
For Robby and Greta Hope against Hope
“MANY PASSENGERS STOP TO TAKE THEIR PLEASURE OR MAKE
THEIR PROFIT IN [VANITY] FAIR, INSTEAD OF GOING ONWARD TO
THE CELESTIAL CITY. INDEED, SUCH ARE THE CHARMS OF THE
PLACE THAT PEOPLE OFTEN AFFIRM IT TO BE THE TRUE AND ONLY
HEAVEN; STOUTLY CONTENDING THAT THERE IS NO OTHER, THAT
THOSE WHO SEEK FURTHER ARE MERE DREAMERS, AND THAT, IF
THE FABLED BRIGHTNESS OF THE CELESTIAL CITY LAY BUT A
BARE MILE BEYOND THE GATES OF VANITY, THEY WOULD NOT BE
FOOLS ENOUGH TO GO THITHER.
“… THE CHRISTIAN READER, IF HE HAVE HAD NO ACCOUNTS OF
THE CITY LATER THAN BUNYAN’S TIME, WILL BE SURPRISED TO
HEAR THAT ALMOST EVERY STREET HAS ITS CHURCH, AND THAT
THE REVEREND CLERGY ARE NOWHERE HELD IN HIGHER RESPECT
THAN AT VANITY FAIR. AND WELL DO THEY DESERVE SUCH
HONORABLE ESTIMATION; FOR THE MAXIMS OF WISDOM AND
VIRTUE, WHICH FALL FROM THEIR LIPS, COME FROM AS DEEP A
SPIRITUAL SOURCE, AND TEND TO US AS LOFTY A RELIGIOUS AIM,
AS THOSE OF THE SAGEST PHILOSOPHERS OF OLD.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad”
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I INTRODUCTION: THE OBSOLESCENCE OF LEFT AND RIGHT
The Current Mood
Limits: The Forbidden Topic
The Making of a Malcontent
The Land of Opportunity: A Parent’s View
The Party of the Future and Its Quarrel with “Middle America”
The Promised Land of the New Right
2 THE IDEA OF PROGRESS RECONSIDERED
A Secular Religion?
Belief in Progress as the Antidote to Despair
Against the “Secularization Thesis”
What the Idea of Progress Really Means
Providence and Fortune, Grace and Virtue
Adam Smith’s Rehabilitation of Desire
Smith’s Misgivings about “General Security and Happiness”
Desire Domesticated
Henry George on Progress and Poverty
Inconspicuous Consumption, the “Superlative Machine”
The Keynesian Critique of Thrift
Optimism or Hope?
3 NOSTALGIA: THE ABDICATION OF MEMORY
Memory or Nostalgia?
The Pastoral Sensibility Historicized and Popularized
Images of Childhood: From Gratitude to Pathos
The American West, Childhood of the Nation
From Solitary Hunter to He-man
The Village Idyll: The View from “Pittsburgh”
Nostalgia Named as Such: The Twenties
History as a Progression of Cultural Styles
Nostalgia Politicized
The Frozen Past
4 THE SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITION AND THE IDEA OF COMMUNITY
Cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment
The Enlightenment’s Critique of Particularism
The Reaction against Enlightenment: Burke’s Defense of Prejudice
Action, Behavior, and the Discovery of “Society”
Culture against Civilization
Gemeinsschaftschmerz
The Moral Ambivalence of the Sociological Tradition
Marxism, the Party of the Future
The Structure of Historical Necessity
“Modernization” as an Answer to Marxism
The Last Refuge of Modernization Theory
5 THE POPULIST CAMPAIGN AGAINST “IMPROVEMENT”
The Current Prospect: Progress or Catastrophe?
The Discovery of Civic Humanism
The Civic Tradition in Recent Historical Writing
Tom Paine: Liberal or Republican?
William Cobbett and the “Paper System”
Orestes Brownson and the Divorce between Politics and Religion
Brownson’s Attack on Philanthropy
Lockean Liberalism: A “Bourgeois” Ideology?
Early Opposition to Wage Labor
Acceptance of Wage Labor and Its Implications
The New Labor History and the Rediscovery of the Artisan
Artisans against Innovation
Agrarian Populism: The Producer’s Last Stand
The Essence of Nineteenth-Century Populism
6 “NO ANSWER BUT AN ECHO”: THE WORLD WITHOUT WONDER
Carlyle’s Clothes Philosophy
Calvinism as Social Criticism
Puritan Virtue
“The Healthy Know Not of Their Health”
Carlyle and the Prophetic Tradition
Political and Literary Misreadings of Carlyle
Emerson in His Contemporaries’ Eyes: Stoic and “Seer”
The Puritan Background of Emerson’s Thought: Jonathan Edwards and the
Theology of “Consent”
Edwards on True Virtue
The “Moral Argument” against Calvinism
Emerson on Fate
“Compensation”: The Theology of Producerism
Emerson as a Populist
Virtue, the “True Fire”
Virtue in Search of a Calling
The Eclipse of Idealism in the Gilded Age
William James: The Last Puritan?
The Philosophy of Wonder
Art and Science: New Religions
The Strenuous Life of Sainthood
Superstition or Desiccation?
7 THE SYNDICALIST MOMENT: CLASS STRUGGLE AND WORKERS’
CONTROL AS THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF PROPRIETORSHIP AND
WAR
The Cult of “Mere Excitement”
James on Moral Equivalence
Sorel’s Attack on Progress
The Case for “Pessimism”
War as Discipline against Resentment
The Sectarian Dilemma
Wage Slavery and the “Servile State”: G. D. H. Cole and Guild Socialism
The Attempt to Reconcile Syndicalism with Collectivism
From Workers’ Control to “Community”: The Absorption of Guild Socialism by
Social Democracy
8 WORK AND LOYALTY IN THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF THE
“PROGRESSIVE” ERA
Progressive and Social Democratic Criticism of American Syndicalism
Revolutionary Socialism versus Syndicalism: The Case of William English
Walling
The IWW and the Intellectuals: Love at First Sight
Herbert Croly on “Industrial Self-Government”
Walter Weyl’s Orthodox Progressivism: The Democracy of Consumers
Rival Perspectives on the Democratization of Culture
Van Wyck Brooks and the Search for a “Genial Middle Ground”
The Controversy about Immigration: Assimilation or Cultural Pluralism?
Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty
The Postwar Reaction against Progressivism
Lippmann’s Farewell to Virtue
Dewey’s Reply to Lippmann: Too Little Too Late
9 THE SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE AGAINST RESENTMENT
Reinhold Niebuhr on Christian Mythology
The Virtue of Particularism
The “Endless Cycle of Social Conflict” and How to Break It
Niebuhr’s Challenge to Liberalism Denatured and Deflected
Liberal Realism after Niebuhr: The Critique of Tribalism
Martin Luther King’s Encounter with Niebuhr
Hope without Optimism
Indigenous Origins of the Civil Rights Movement
The Collapse of the Civil Rights Movement in the North
From Civil Rights to Social Democracy
The Politics of Resentment and Reparation
10 THE POLITICS OF THE CIVILIZED MINORITY
Liberal Perceptions of the Public after World War I
America the Unbeautiful
Social Criticism, Disembodied and Connected
Sociology as Social Criticism: The Apotheosis of the Expert
Experts and Orators: Thurman Arnold’s “Anthropological” Satire
The “Machiavelli” of the Managerial Revolution
From Satire to Social Pathology: Gunnar Myrdal on the “American Dilemma”
The Discovery of the Authoritarian Personality
Politics as Therapy
The Liberal Critique of Populism
Populism as Working-Class Authoritarianism
Educated Insularity
Camelot after Kennedy: Oswald as Everyman
11 RIGHT-WING POPULISM AND THE REVOLT AGAINST LIBERALISM
The “White Backlash”
A Growing Middle Class?
Working-Class and Lower-Middle-Class Convergence
The Lower-Middle-Class Ethic of Limits and the Abortion Debate
The Cultural Class War
The Politics of Race: Antibusing Agitation in Boston
“Populism” and the New Right
The Theory of the New Class and Its Historical Antecedents
Neoconservatives on the New Class
New-Class “Permissiveness” or Capitalist Consumerism?
The New Class as Seen from the Left
A Universal Class?
Populism against Progress
Bibliographical Essay